Arundhati Roy's 1997 debut, The God of Small Things, combined intimate, regionally specific family drama with universal themes of kinship, class, gender, and forbidden love, winning the Booker Prize and selling millions. Rather than immediately producing another novel, Roy spent the next two decades focused on political engagement and nonfiction, tackling nuclear expansion, environmental destruction, gendered violence, and the suppression of pluralism. Roy allocated part of her royalties to a trust supporting activists and journalists, published a large nonfiction collection, and produced rare autobiographical reportage, including an extended account of time spent among Maoist rebels.
It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy's début novel, "The God of Small Things." A family drama set in a small town in Kerala, in southern India, it was evocatively specific in its narrative, centered on twins whose mother-an erratic, imperious woman of exceptional gifts and unsalvable injuries-had been scandalously married, and more scandalously divorced. At the same time, the book achieved universality in its themes: the entanglements of kinship, the restrictions imposed by class and gender, the hazards of star-crossed love.
If readers assumed that another novel would swiftly follow, Roy, then thirty-five, flouted their expectation; she didn't publish a second novel—"The Ministry of Utmost Happiness"—until 2017. In the meantime, she devoted her energies and her international renown to political writing in India, taking on the expansion of the country's nuclear arsenal, the despoliation of rivers and forests in the name of development, the brutalities inflicted on women, and the suppression of cultural pluralism in the name of Hindu supremacy.
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